Book Review: A Tour-de-Force Debut from Emily Tesh

Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh (Tordotcom)

After a devastating alien attack destroys Earth, a handful of survivors cling to the hope of revenge on Gaea Station, a satellite cobbled from the few remaining warships. A generation later, young people have been genetically modified and rigorously trained to be “warbreed” fighters, huge, strong, and…obedient. Normal human teens are assigned to other tasks churning out babies to keep humankind going. Warbreed Kyr (Valkyrie) has spent her entire life training to face “the Wisdom,” the reality-shaping alien weapon that doomed Earth. She excels in every physical test, she drives her lesser mess-mates mercilessly, and she has no emotional ties to anyone except her brother. She fully expects to be given a prized post…but Command has other ideas. Instead, her brother is sent on a death mission and she is consigned to the Nursery to bear sons for Gaea Station until she dies an early death.

At first, I found Kyr a highly unsympathetic character. She’s arrogant, entitled, and generally a self-centered bully. She’s unthinkingly cruel to the helpless young alien whose ship is captured. In short, I didn’t like her at all. But I kept reading on the strength of the prose and the hope that she would eventually get her comeuppance. And then the plot spins around in another direction…and yet another…

Refusing her Nursery assignment, Kyr ends up on the run with her brother, the alien, and her brother’s unrequited crush, a brilliant but psychopathic computer whiz (who is also a boy, but queer relationships are forbidden on Gaea Station because of the crushing need to increase the human population.)

Their flight takes them to a planet inhabited by both humans and aliens, where lush green, fresh air, blue skies, and joyful play contrast with the bleak sterility of her previous life. Not only that, she encounters her older sister, who was supposed to be dead, and her nephew, fathered by the autocratic Commander whom Kyr had once worshipped. Faced with the undeniable reality that the universe is vaster and more wonderful than she imagined, Kyr begins to question everything she has been taught, even her own memories. She starts asking who she would be if Earth had not been destroyed or if the Commander had not been a power-hungry tyrant bent on retaliation. If she’d grown up in an enriched, natural environment. If she’d been allowed to love anyone—starting with herself.

By this time, I was thoroughly hooked. With each deviation from the opening scenario, the entire universe changes—and Kyr with it. The author brilliantly takes us inside each iteration of Kyr, the good and the bad, the memories and the blindnesses. It’s a tour-de-force that kept me turning pages and falling in love with a true heroine.

Very Short Book Reviews: In the world of Tim Powers, things go seriously pear-shaped

After Many A Summer, by Tim Powers (Subterranean)

Tim Powers is a master of turning an already weird tale five ways on its head, upside down, and inside out until it begs for mercy in ancient Akkadian. His new short novel, After Many A Summer, is no exception. It begins, as do many of his books, with a semblance of normality: a down-on-his-luck screenwriter, Conrad, accepts a too-good-to-be-true deal from a movie studio: they’ll produce his script for a fabulous sum if he drives a valise around LA, transferring it from one vehicle to another. What does he have to lose? He figures this is an elaborate scheme for delivering a ransom for a kidnapped heiress. He’s sort-of right and very, very wrong. The heiress is indeed being held captive, but the valise contains a centuries-old mummified skull that can talk, prophesize, and even alter the course of time itself, and is given to quoting the poet Tennyson. And that’s just the beginning of things going seriously pear-shaped.

I’ve loved the work of Tim Powers ever since I discovered The Anubis Gates in 1983, so I was prepared for superb storytelling and major revamping of reality. I was not disappointed on either count. The story, taking the reader further and further from expectations, requires a bit of patience, but the central character is sympathetic enough to act as a naïve if likeable guide. Highly enjoyable (and an object lesson).

Sleepy Mind, Great Ideas... Maybe

Why is it that juicy story ideas, as well as brilliant solutions to plot problems, pop into my mind when I'm dozing off? All right, that's a rhetorical question. We all know that as we drift into sleep, our brain activity changes. Logic and other constraints on creativity shut down and we make unusual and often wonderful connections between otherwise disparate bits of memory, thoughts, etc. The point of my question is not why this happens, but what to do about the inevitable waking up and being unable to remember.

Catherine Mintz playfully suggests that "it is a law of writing that wonderful things appear as soon as you are too tired to make notes."

Keeping a pen and paper at bedside is a logical remedy. I've done this for a dream journal, which has a slightly different objective, and I've done it for writing ideas at various times over the years. I don't any more, and here's why.

Very Short Book Reviews: An Angels and Demons Murder Mystery in the Weird West

Tread of Angels, by Rebecca Roanhorse

What a marvelous page-turner of an “Angels and Devils in the Weird West” murdeer mystery adventure! Rebecca Roanhorse does a brilliant job dropping the reader into an Old-West-That-Never-Was, a town that mines divinity as an energy-source mineral, populated by the Fallen descendants of demons and ruled by the snobbish ruling-class human Elects and their police arm, the Virtues.

In the late 1880s. a cardsharp named Celeste and her sister Mariel, an immensely talented singer, eke out a living. They’re both Fallen, although Celeste has managed to hide her outcast status. She’s also trying to forget an intensely passionate affair with a demonlord. Her world shatters when Mariel is arrested for the murder of a Virtue, and the only way to save her is for Celeste to become an untrained defense attorney, a “Devil’s Advocate” or advocatus diaboli. To make matters worse, she has only a short time, not nearly enough to investigate, and she’s managed to put herself in debt to her demon lover.

The story swept me up on the first page and didn’t let go until the surprising, ambivalent-but-satisfying conclusion. I especially admired how Roanhorse plomped me into her world without big chunks of exposition. Instead, she uses character, action, and nuanced detail to construct a world as seen through the eyes of an unreliable but highly sympathetic protagonist.

Highly recommended.

Writer's Round Table: Pros Give Advice on Writer's Block

A few years ago, a friend wrote poignantly about what it's like to be blocked. I asked some pro writer friends for words of encouragement.



This is from a well-known, NYTimes-best-selling author:

WRITER'S BLOCK

I am sitting here looking at a fic I have not touched since 2007.  I have 135K done, including the last scene...or, about 2/3 of the total fic.  I am ALSO sitting here looking at a novel that was due three years ago, for which I have something similar to an outline and the first 50K written (only 100K to go, right?) 

I've been writing fanfic and profic since the 80s, and dealing with blocked, derailed, and MIA stories for most of that time.  Here are some of the strategies that have worked for me.  (NOTE: some of these ideas are mutually-exclusive, because every writer writes differently.)

1. WELCOME TO THE GULAG: Block out a specific time and place where you do the same thing every day: sit in front of the screen and make words come.  Doesn't matter what you write, or even if you don't write.  Just be there doing nothing else (no shopping, no reading AO3, no social media) for that one or two hours (no more) each and every day (same Bat-time, same Bat-channel).  Eventually your brain gives up and you get to write what you want to write.

1A. If absolutely nothing else will come to your fingers, choose a favorite book (or longfic) and retype it. 

2. FACE THE MUSIC: Between day job and commute (long) I was really bushed when Writing Time arrived in the evening.  I just didn't have the energy—but I did have a deadline.  Solution?  ROCK'N'ROLL BAY-BEE!!!  I wrote two novels to "Bad To The Bone".  Just that one track.  On infinite repeat.  Loud.  So pick a piece of music, declare it your writing music, and hit "Repeat" on iTunes.